FIVE DAYS ON A THREE-DAY CLIMB

Mount Rainier’s Liberty Ridge

By Jim Rickard

Kurt Wibbenmeyer (left) and Jim Rickard ascending lower Liberty Ridge. Photo by Doug Kruesi

In 1998, I planned a climb of Mount Rainier via Liberty Ridge. A team member cancelled, the trip was o , and I ended up in Baja California.

I revived the idea in 2007, but a CMC trip to climb in the Alps was just too good to pass up. Another cancellation; this time my fault.

Still, on my “list,” I planned again for Liberty Ridge in May 2008. After recruiting a couple of good climbers and good friends, Doug Kruesi and Kurt Wibbenmeyer, it looked as if this one was a go. We scheduled vacations, bought airline tickets, did training climbs, and registered with Mount Rainier National Park. is time it was going to happen.

Two days before our ight, the Washington State Department of Transportation announced Cayuse Pass wouldn’t be open by Memorial Day weekend, and a park ranger called to tell us the road to the White River Campground (our trailhead) was still under several feet of snow and wouldn’t be open.

We did some desperate Internet research about other approaches to Liberty Ridge—all of which were long—looked into other routes, and did some general grumbling. On the morning of Friday, May 23, the WSDOT Web site was revised to say that Cayuse Pass would be opened at noon. Our ight was that evening. Maybe we could get close? e park gate is about six miles from the trailhead; could we handle the extra distance?

In keeping with the theme of the trip, our ight was over an hour late. We got our rental van in Seattle, found our hotel in the dark, and woke the night attendant

Doug Kruesi at Thumb Rock camp. Photo by Jim Rickard ]

to get keys to our room. Still with no solid information, we planned to get up early and drive to the north side of the park on the assumption we could make an attempt on Liberty Ridge. If the roads weren’t open, we would have a very long drive back to the coastal lowlands and around to the south side of Mount Rainier to try another route. We still didn’t have stove fuel, but assumed we could nd some along the way. Heading out Highway 410, we began passing signs warning that Cayuse and Chinook passes were closed, that the highway was closed 40 miles ahead, and so on. Hoping the WSDOT Web site was more up to date than the signs, we drove on. A Target store, our rst try for fuel, wouldn’t open until 10:00 am; we drove on. Although their main doors were locked, our next try, Walmart, was open. With a little more good luck, we bought their very last can of white gas. Fuel in hand, and a good breakfast at a roadside cafe improved our spirits. We passed another painted sign saying the pass was closed, but right next to it was a lighted electric sign saying it was open. Surely the electric sign was current? Above 2,000 feet there was deep snow on both sides of the road, but the road was plowed. We entered the park and reached the turno for White River, just as a park ranger was locking the gate on the closed road. After explaining our situation, and asking if he could give us, or even just our packs, a ride, he said he could let us through, but that we probably couldn’t get past the ranger station. Yes! at would put us just over four miles from the trailhead.

After we lled out the paperwork, and

got our “blue bags”, he offered to see if he could get us any farther up the road—was this guy great, or what? On the rst try, we couldn’t get past a snow blower working on the road, and there was no place to park. However, after we arranged our gear, we were able to get to the parking area for Owyhigh Lakes, about three miles from the trailhead. We put on snowshoes, loaded up our very heavy packs, and trudged past the bulldozer working on the six feet of snow on the road. We were at 3,700 feet, 10,412 feet below Liberty Cap; the scale of our planned climb began to sink in.

*** e plan, now that we were almost back to it, was to pack in to Glacier Basin (>6,000’) the rst night; cross the Winthrop and Carbon glaciers, and climb the lower portion of Liberty Ridge to umb Rock (>10,600’) the second night; then over the top (14,112’) and down to Camp Schurman (>9,500’) or all the way out by the third night. One of the problems with climbing Liberty Ridge is that everything has to be carried up a technical climb and over the top. With this in mind, we had trimmed the weight as much as we could, going over gear lists again and again and throwing out everything we thought we could get by without. Even so, you can only get so light; each of us had around 80 pounds of equipment, while perhaps 20 pounds of this was “worn” (such as boots, clothing, etc.) and 60 pounds was left in the packs.

We trudged up the road, with some nice views of the mountain in the distance, eventually reaching the Glacier Basin trailhead at the White River Campground. e deep snow made the trail di cult to follow in some areas, but eased the multiple stream crossings, where ooding had badly disrupted this trail. At some point we began nding strips of “caution tape,” apparently marking the way, but not always taking a logical route. As we were eating lunch I grumbled something about the fact that “ ey must have sent out some junior ranger with a roll of tape to guess at the route.” Moments later, said “junior ranger” and his roll of caution tape stepped out of a tangle of down trees along a slide path; the only person we saw on our hike in. Fortunately, he hadn’t heard me. We continued to Glacier Basin, and even pushed our camp an extra 500’ uphill. It had been an exhausting day, but we were on our way! at night it rained. Instead of an 8- to 10-pound expedition tent, we had brought a 2-pound GoLite Hex, a teepee-like arrangement consisting of a conical tarp, a single center pole, and a separate oor. While it was lightweight, with three people in it you couldn’t help but have part of your sleeping bag or pad hang out, which resulted in them becoming wet. With no chance of anything drying in the foggy morning, it all got packed wet, and remained wet (or frozen) for the rest of the trip. Oh, this was going to be fun.

We left our snowshoes in Glacier Basin, put on crampons, and headed up Saint Elmo Pass. Even with the rain and lightening, we were well rested, and were moving well. From the top of the pass we dropped a couple hundred feet onto the Winthrop Glacier and roped up. e clouds moved in and out, providing occasional glimpses of the shattered glacier above, alternating with whiteouts, which obscured the route ahead. It hadn’t dipped below freezing the night before, so walking on the soft, raindrenched snow was work, but not overly di cult—most steps sank in 6” or so. Perhaps a third of the way across the glacier, Doug dropped into a crevasse to his hips; it was time to start taking this a little more seriously.

We alternated leading, and made it across the glacier to Curtis Ridge. Clouds had clamped down at about 10,500 feet, making it di cult to discern our route. But it was clear from here that while Curtis and Ptarmigan might be “ridges,” Liberty was a “buttress” at best. Carbon Glacier, starting from twin cirques on either side of Liberty Ridge, had chewed it away to a very steep, short, spur, rising 5,300 vertical feet in 6,700 horizontal feet. e toe of Liberty Ridge was still well above us at about 8,800’.

My 1996 guidebook indicated that you could reach Carbon Glacier from about the 7,500’ level on Curtis Ridge—whether the glacier has changed, or the author was mistaken, it would now require a 200-foot rappel o of rotten rock. We elected to take a quarter-mile detour down the ridge, lose a few hundred more feet, and start our crossing of the heavily crevassed Carbon Glacier from a safer start. Looking up Carbon toward our goal was intimidating; large crevasses and seracs appeared to block our way. Two possible routes presented themselves:

Doug Kruesi leads, while Kurt Wibbenmeyer belays above Thumb Rock. Photo by Jim Rickard

one generally straight up the glacier, veering slightly east of Liberty Ridge; and another less direct approach involving crossing Carbon to the west, climbing steeply between seracs to a shelf in the glacier, and returning to approach the ridge from the west. We found traces of a previous party’s tracks heading for the long route. After some discussion, we decided that if they took the less obvious route, perhaps they knew something we didn’t, and we headed o following what we could nd of their old track. e route went well enough to the base of the ridge, where we had to cross a couple impressive crevasses on dubious snow bridges. After those, we crossed a small bergschrund, and climbed to the ridge crest. At this point we learned that regardless of the name, “Liberty Ridge” really isn’t a ridge route. e spine of the ridge is loose, fractured, volcanic rock, precariously stacked in vertical pillars. It appeared the easiest route was to climb the steep snow and ice just west of the ridge crest, crossing bands of loose rock only when necessary. At times, it seemed that climbing the glacier along the perimeter of the cirque might be easier, but as afternoon wore on, bus-sized seracs began to break from the hanging glaciers, fall hundreds of feet, and explode into avalanches that swept the walls above the glacier. OK, so maybe Liberty Ridge isn’t a great route, but it’s the only route in the area that isn’t suicide. Once on the ridge, and away from the crevasses, we unroped. In most places we could probably self arrest, and in any case we were too tired to deal with protection. I found that I was panting so hard for so long that the roof of my mouth was drying and cracking. We traded o breaking trail in the fresh snow—apparently the previous night’s rain had been snow at this elevation—and trudged on to our campsite. e clouds closed around us and it began to snow.

*** umb Rock is big. From thousands of feet below it had appeared to be a small ake on the ridge; here it was a tower 100 feet long, 40 feet high, and 15 feet thick. It’s not a single rock, either, but an aggregation of loosely bound chunks. ere was a small rectangular tent platform dug into the saddle beyond the thumb, but it didn’t t our more or less circular tent, and the wind was raging, making it all the more di cult. Instead, we pitched the tent right next to umb Rock on the leeward side. Looking at it from the high side just before going to bed, setting up our little nylon cone below a 40-foot high, 15-footwide pinnacle of loose stones didn’t look wise. What were the chances one of those rocks would fall through the tent and hit us in the night—1 in 10 maybe? After our 5,100-vertical-foot day with full packs, we were too tired to care; we hoped for the best. e vantage from umb Rock made something else clear: We had wondered why all the route descriptions had you packing over the top. Why not set a high camp at umb Rock, climb to the summit with a day pack, and return? Because downclimbing, even on the relatively moderate slopes below the thumb, would be dangerous! Sure, you could do a pitch, or two, or ten; but in 2,000 feet the chance of making a mistake gets pretty high, and protecting the whole descent would take forever. is was the next thing we learned about this route: It is a total commitment; you can’t go left or right due to near continuous serac fall, and you can’t go down due to length and danger.

During the night the wind occasionally shifted direction just enough to shake the tent violently and force snow through the wall/ oor gap to form drifts over and between our already wet sleeping bags. At times, the gusts were so violent I feared the tent would tear away. What would we do then? Sometime after midnight the winds nally calmed—peace at last, except for the ongoing thunder of falling seracs—and we got some sleep.

We woke to a beautiful morning, shook the snow o our sleeping bags and out of our boots, and started gearing up for another day. About 100 feet out of camp we found that what had appeared to be more steep snow was about 8 inches of fresh powder over hard ice. Ice so hard and brittle that your ax bounces o ; so you hit it again, harder. is time a large “dinner plate” of ice pops out and skitters down the slope, and still your ax isn’t holding. Out came the ropes, pickets, and our pitiful collection of three ice screws (trimmed down from six to save weight). We carried on, simul-climbing when we could, and belaying when we had to. What else was there to do? One of my vivid memories from this climb was belaying the leader out and watching him start to hammer in a picket: “ wack, thwack, ping . . .” uh, that’s ice, it isn’t going in, “ping,” still not going in, “ping-ping-ping-ping!” It’s not going in even if you really REALLY want it to; but what could I say, I’d done exactly the same on the previous pitch. Eventually the leader cleared the ice and started putting in a screw, leaning on it as hard as possible— which is very di cult while balancing on front points—to get it to bite into the glasshard ice. e day wore on, the clouds closed in, it started snowing. We realized we wouldn’t make Camp Schurman, so we’d be camping on the summit. Later, perhaps 7:00 pm, Kurt said the unspeakable, we weren’t going to make the summit, so we had to nd a place to bivi. e closest things to bivi sites were the occasional patches where the slope eased o to “only” 45 degrees. With hard ice just inches under the snow, “digging in” wasn’t an option. We continued on. Near 13,100 feet, around 9:00 pm, in poor visibility and gathering twilight, I was the third man on a pitch. Doug and Kurt above were clearly not happy, talking and pointing at something I couldn’t see o in the endless white. Eventually they remembered me, and belayed me up. en I saw it, a slope of 50 degrees or more of ice heading up to a vertical cli of ice. e near whiteout made it di cult to judge size and distance, but clearly we had a serious problem.

We were on the crest of Liberty Ridge, having just climbed a snow and ice slope on the west side. e east side was rocky and fell away almost vertically, but among the rocks were little pockets that could almost be called ledges. Perhaps 25 feet below us was one such ledge of ice, snow, and rock, about six feet wide. Sloping toward the precipice at about 20 degrees, it seemed to be our best hope for a bivi. We chipped out what rocks we could, tried to shovel in some snow to cover others, and piled up what we could against the rocks along the edge to create some sort of “lip” before the fall. Having a tent with no oor actually paid o in this place. We secured it to the rocks with stoppers, rope, pickets, and whatever we could make hold, and propped up the interior pole. It was clear pads and sleeping bags would quickly slide away, so I climbed back to the ridge, secured one of our ropes to a large rock, and allowed two ends and a loop to hang down into the tent. ese would be our lifelines. We attached ourselves and our packs to one of the lines with prussicks. Our boots went into the packs, and we slid into our wet, frozen sleeping bags fully clothed, hanging from our harnesses. Kurt had managed to heat enough

Kurt Wibbenmeyer (left) and Jim Rickard at the forced bivi on descent. Photo by Doug Kruesi ]

water for us each to have a hot cup of tea (but no dinner), and we settled in for what I assumed would be a miserable night.

Much to my surprise, we slept. I awoke hours later, my legs nearly numb from hanging in the harness, and needing badly to pee (an epic struggle I won’t go into). After relieving myself, I released the leg loops on my harness, hung from the waist belt to change the pain, and fell asleep again.

In the morning, the ice above us still looked di cult, but not impossible. e rst pitch was mine, and I did a climbing traverse to the left, trying for as much distance as possible before running out of protection. I ended my run screwed to a 45-degree ice slope below large seracs, which gave me something to think about as I belayed the others up: “If that serac were to fall, would it dump o to the left or crush me?” Doug took the next pitch, heading directly to the base of the serac before turning right and climbing along the base of the ice cli toward a lower section that might provide a route higher. He placed his nal screw directly into the vertical face, and could only turn it about halfway in, then hung on it—not very encouraging. He belayed Kurt, and nally me up. As I removed the other screws I was acutely aware that all three of us were now hanging on one poorly embedded ice screw. Kurt got the next pitch, continuing to the “weakness” we had spotted, then climbing a short section of 65- or 70-degree ice to reach the next layer. ere he paused and said, “I think this is as far as I go.” No one said a word. After a few minutes he said, “Well, maybe I’ll go a little farther,” and he continued on. When I was belayed up, I found the others clinging to 50-degree plus ice below yet another cli . Oh goody, my turn—at least it was only eight feet of dead vertical. Pulling myself gracelessly over the lip brought a brief moment of relief, until I realized that just below me to the right was the edge of the serac, the full height of which we had been working our way through all morning. A fall here would be bad. My belayer chose that moment to say something about how much rope I had left, which I really didn’t hear, but replied with a long string of feardriven profanities. Finally getting a hold of myself, I reminded myself it was my turn, I had a job to do, and I continued up, placing my remaining screws. Kurt led another ice pitch as the slope eased slightly; then Doug—who had been longing for “steep snow”, rather than ice—saw his chance. Fifty feet into his lead he placed a picket, probably just to prove he could, then took o —never pausing, never looking back. e rst 400 feet above camp had taken us almost four hours; Doug dragged us up the next 400 feet in 40 minutes or less. It felt good to be making progress again.

***

At 3:00 in the afternoon, a day later than planned, we nally reached the summit of Liberty Cap. At 14,112 feet, with a 492-foot drop between it and Columbia Crest, it could be considered Washington’s second-highest mountain. On the other hand, from any distance, it’s just a pimple northwest of Rainier’s summit. Having never climbed Rainier before, I had originally hoped to continue to the high point. But not this time; we wanted nothing more than to get down.

Finally on easy ground, and going downhill, Kurt led a forced march across the mile-wide summit plateau toward the head of Winthrop Glacier. ere we hoped

to nd the climber’s trail for the popular Emmons-Winthrop route, and follow it for an easy cruise down to Camp Schurman. Alas, it was not to be; with the road closed, no one had climbed the route, and there was no trace of a trail. We had clear skies and sun above, but a solid cloud deck below at about 12,000 feet. Kurt, who had climbed the Emmons-Winthrop route before, led us down through crevasses and seracs, and even managed to point out Camp Schurman during a momentary clearing. But once we entered the clouds, we were in a full whiteout. We continued descending several hundred feet, carefully probing each step to avoid stepping in a crevasse or o a cli . Eventually, about 7:00 pm, our luck ran out; we were completely “cli ed-out” in a whiteout, with no options left but to reclimb our track.

We resigned ourselves to another unplanned bivi. Prior to this trip, I had spent a total of two unplanned nights out in my entire life; this trip alone added two more. We climbed back to a relatively at spot and began probing—sure enough, we were standing atop a crevasse. We moved up a few feet, where it wasn’t at, and began digging in. At least it was snow on this side of the mountain, rather than ice, and, with a fair amount of e ort, we were able to carve out a tent site. We even melted snow and made dinner. As the sun set, there was a brief period of clearing, and we were able to make a plan, doing our best to memorize our tentative route in case whiteout conditions returned in the morning.

Sure enough, they did. We awoke, ate, and packed in the clouds. I thought I had some feel for the route we had plotted out the night before, and o ered to lead. Being “that kind” of trip, the morning’s rst obstacle was just above camp: A crevasse spanned by a very marginal covering of snow had been easy enough to slip across while descending the evening before, but placing axes and kicking steps into that thin skim of snow in order to climb back up got the adrenaline going. Some slow travel, carefully probing and stepping into the great white void, a couple sketchy snow bridges, and we were headed down again. e weather didn’t improve, and at one point we just sat, ate, drank, and stared into the whiteness for 15 minutes hoping to see . . . something. Nevertheless, without further mishap, we three tired climbers trudged down to the ranger cabin at Camp Schurman. ey were glad to see us, not only because we were now a day overdue on even the “pessimistic” one-extra-day schedule we had registered, but because they were bored, there was no on else there to talk to. Descending the Inter Glacier, we passed two other bored rangers out for a day hike. Apparently the north side of the park was sta ed for the holiday weekend crowds, but with the road still closed, there was nothing for them to do.

We recovered our snowshoes and hiked out the Glacier Basin Trail. Arriving at White River Campground, we found the road had been plowed, or at least an eightfoot wide “trench” down the center of the road had been cleared by the snow blower, just hours before! Not wanting to carry our packs a foot farther than we had to, Doug dropped his, and o ered to walk the three miles down the road and get the car—I wasn’t about to argue. Within a couple hundred yards, he came across yet another bored park ranger, who had received a radio call from Camp Schurman that we were headed down, and was waiting to give him a ride. What service! Well worth the $30 registration fee!

Looking back, I’m glad to have climbed Liberty Ridge, but I sure wouldn’t do it again. For anyone considering this route, be aware of how much of a commitment it is; there’s no way down but up, so weather, injuries, and gear failure should be considered. We had no cell phone service from the ridge, and even if we had, windows of “ ying weather” for a potential rescue were few and short. Just to check if I had been exaggerating the di culties in my mind, I went back to the Internet and found trip reports from the two parties who had climbed the route a week before us. ey con rmed our experience:

We made it, but not without great dif culty. . . . It was some of the most terrifying climbing I’ve ever done. At the umb there was a constant showcase of avi’s, ice, and rockfall. Summit day was 15 hours of exhausting climbing in deep snow and hard alpine ice with a constant attack of falling ice and rock. . . . we dragged ourselves to the top and reached the summit at 5 PM for a total of 12 hours of climbing from high camp. inking we could make it to Camp Schurman, we started down the Emmons in good conditions, but occasional whiteouts and fatigue forced us to stop short of our goal, setting up camp in a crevasse. △

Jim Rickard is a longtime CMC member, as is his mother, Jo Anne Rickard. He recently joined the Colorado Wilderness Families group to introduce his children to the CMC. Jim has climbed more than 270 Colorado ranked peaks, including the hundred highest; along with numerous mountains in the Western States, Alaska, South and Central America, Africa, and Eurasia.△

Jim Rickard pauses while descending into the clouds. Photo by Doug Kruesi